As we know, urban interventions in the streets differ a lot. Not only for the scale or the media used but also, as Jan Vormann already pointed out in his interview, for the aim that the artist follows in the city. Claiming space in society, underlining social or political problems, performing an idealistic advertisement of your ideas and/or yourself or simply gathering people in the street and play a bit with the city. I would like to present hereby a pair of examples that I believe are made with a sincere playfulness and in which we can find a unique scale of interpretation. In particular, urban interventions which aim is to decontextualize already existing elements of the city.

First representative of this category could be Roadsworth, a canadian artist who plays a funny game with road paintings, choosing a delicate irony to change the meaning of signs, as he explains:

“In the spirit of Marcel Duchamps, all I had to do was paint a mustache on the Mona Lisa so to speak, to introduce a glitch in the matrix.”

In the same line, we could talk about Mentalgassi, a Berlin-based artists collective in which work we can find the same easiness and vivacity in surprising us with the common urban furniture we (don’t) see everyday.

With a similar spirit, Rebar studio, based in San Francisco, turns our parking lots in small gardens for a day. They call this practice ‘tactical urbanism’, which means short and temporary changes in the surroundings, as a spark of a bigger transformation of the environment. The particular aim of this last work is a bit more critique and has a long-term project in the background, but it indeed succeeds in the process of decontextualization of common street elements and use them in a different way from the one they were originally thought.

In the same line of critique aim to wake up people responsibility are positioned interventions like Guerrilla Gardening and similar, that are luckily becoming more and more common in our public space.

Having or not a big, maybe commercial project in mind, but nevertheless always looking for the good spot, because they want people to notice their work, artists surprise us everyday with their interventions and give their contribution, I believe, to the richness of the city in its contemporary form.

Thousands of stray dogs roam the streets of Santiago, Chile everyday while nobody even notices it. Two college students with a clear love for dogs decided to change this with a simple, yet creative urban intervention.

Are highly commercial megastores and supermalls the new domains of guerrilla artists? Encastrable is an interesting urban project intiated by Paul Souviron and Antoine Lejolivet of the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs. The project consists of a series of guerrilla art residencies (seven at the moment) held inside gardening and DIY megastores in and around Paris. “At no…

French street artist The Wa has spiced up the streets of Milan with a new, rather critical artwork — he recently installed a roller blind at a digital city billboard. The ‘Curtain’, as Urban Shit calls the work, enables passers-by to decide themselves whether or not they want to see the advertisement.

Keep your head down low or you might miss it all! Spread across the world pedestrian crossings are turning into bright and colorful works of art coming straight from the hands of renown artist Carlos Cruz-Diez (born 1923 in Caracas). Already in the 1970s, the Venezuelan artist discovered the streets as a medium for art and has, thus, implemented several interventions in urban spaces before anybody even knew what it meant.